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Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

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Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#61

Post by wffurr »

jader201 wrote: post #60

This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1] It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV. Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-pers…

That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.

It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.

I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.

Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#63

Post by jader201 »

wffurr wrote: post #61
jader201 wrote: post #60

This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1] It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV. Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-pers…

That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder. It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse. I do like the idea of the…

It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming.

Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.

The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).

Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.

(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)

Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#64

Post by jrm4 »

jader201 wrote: post #60

This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1] It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV. Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-pers…

Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.

This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.

Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#66

Post by csande17 »

This project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense).

As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention).

Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M

Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#69

Post by peer2pay »

Back in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost.

We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!

Re: Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

#70

Post by wizzwizz4 »

csande17 wrote: post #66

This project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense). As a game it doesn't seem especiall…

The game, for those without YouTube access, is https://distractedcoder.itch.io/reverse-pac-man.
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